Sisson Documents

[1] Published as The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, they purported to demonstrate that during World War I, Trotsky and Lenin as well as other Bolshevik leaders were agents directed by the German Empire to bring about Russia's withdrawal from the conflict.

On October 27 of that year he left the United States for Russia to serve as the CPI's operative there, but he arrived after the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Russian Provisional Government and was frustrated in most of his efforts.

[7] The New York Evening Post challenged the authenticity of the documents on September 21, 1918 by saying that they had originated with Santeri Nuorteva, a well-known propagandist who had worked for the communist government that the Bolsheviks had established in Finland.

[2] The arguments were largely technical, "ranging from the use of suspicious letterheads and seals, to language discrepancies, to the presence of defunct dating systems..., to apparently forged signatures, and... evidence that the same typewriter had been used to prepare... documents emanating from different offices.

Kennan noted that it was possible the Bolsheviks "received clandestine subsidies from German sources during the summer and early autumn of 1917" but not after the "November Revolution," when the "disintegration of the Russian armed forces–was now an accomplished fact."

It challenged "the growing tendency in academia and government to conflate all forms of totalitarianism, in particular Nazism and Communism" and questioned the wisdom of scholarship's alliance with national interests.

Among the errors and inaccuracies found indicating falsification of documents, a few basic examples can be considered:[17] According to John Maxwell Hamilton and Meghan McCune, "As with all effective disinformation, their power lay in their plausibility.